| Sales is the lowest risk job tech related skill I know of; it works even if we were hit by an apocalypse and had no electricity. In all likelihood, we'll still be making tools and selling those tools. It helps you to think in the problem/business domain too. So you're not simply learning PHP to build a website, you're doing it to say, help people find hotels. It works on your resume, it works for job searching, it helps with getting promotions (proving yourself useful), and it works with landing a higher salary without negotiation. You still can't sell crap. So you need a good product (i.e. yourself, your skill) worth selling. But it complements any other skill you have. There's also communication skill in general. How to refine ideas into denser, cleaner formats that people and AI can understand. This works for sales, and it works for code. Tech-wise, I can't say. The nature of tech is that it's very high risk. If you've had a look at how GPT-3 is engineered [1], it makes you question whether algorithms and OO will be a useful skill in the future. Sam Altman expects us to hit AGI within 2025 [2]. He's probably being a little optimistic, like every other programmer, so let's double the estimate and say we have until 2030. Codex itself scored #96 when pitted against 9000+ humans in a coding challenge [3]. So whatever you pick, it should be fairly AI-proof. Data will be around, and anything that deals with data will be helpful. Even if you could tell AI to do whatever, it has to pull data from somewhere. Spreadsheets are great. Databases will be around for a long time. The top 3 most used DBs or so use some variation of SQL. There will also need to be some kind of front end for data for people (and even AI) to use. Low/no-code has been around forever but there's always a domain it can't solve. Something specialist like Shopify, Magento, WordPress that solves a problem millions of people have. If you want something that combos well with higher risk work, you can learn UI/UX. Again, low risk, low returns. The absolute lowest risk is food. Everyone needs to eat. Farming and cooking will keep you from starving, but probably won't take you much higher than that. [1] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#prompts-as-programming
[2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1081584255510155264
[3] https://challenge.openai.com/codex/leaderboard |